How’s This for a Home Office? A Glass
Cube on the Roof

Jim Thompson and the cube that tops his modern four-story home in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood.
Photo:
Katrina Wittkamp for The Wall Street Journal

By

Erin Geiger Smith

April 1, 2015 1:06 pm ET

When Jim Thompson was designing his Chicago home, he wanted a space where he could feel like he was sitting in the middle of thunderstorms or blizzards.

He told his architect and college friend, Thomas Hickey, that he pictured a cube on the roof. And so they built one. The home’s topper is a 10-foot-wide and 10-foot-tall room overlooking his Lincoln Park neighborhood and downtown Chicago. Three sides and the ceiling are glass. The four-story modern house, completed in 2008, was built about 15 feet behind the brick facade of a more than 100-year-old cottage.

Though conceived as a space to watch the weather, the cube “ended up being a great place to go and get in a different mind-set and think creatively,” says Mr. Thompson, 70, who is unmarried and whose children are grown. He retired about a decade ago as executive vice president and director of client services at Chicago advertising firm Leo Burnett USA, where his accounts included United Airlines, Hallmark and Oldsmobile. Now, he invests in and advises several startups and writes short stories. He turned one story into a screenplay for a 15-minute short currently being shopped to film festivals.

Mr. Thompson does a lot of his writing on a laptop in the sparely decorated cube. The back wall is painted off-white, and the sparse furnishings include a small side table and two Wassily chairs in chocolate-colored leather. “I can bring anything I want up there, but I always take it back down,” Mr. Thompson says.

The sole decoration is a black-and-white poster of Chicago’s landmark John Hancock building, which Mr. Thompson can see from inside the cube. Sometimes, Mr. Thompson switches that poster with one for “Our Longest Drive,” a series on the Golf Channel that followed Mr. Thompson and two friends, who brought along the ashes of a deceased fourth buddy, on a road trip to play golf on the longest day of the year at a three-hole course in Canada’s Northwest Territories, north of the Arctic Circle.

The cube gets too hot by midday in warm months, but Mr. Thompson often works from the space in mornings and evenings. He spends a lot of time “reading and rereading stuff most people read in high school and college,” he says, with works by Saul Bellow, Graham Greene and Leo Tolstoy in the mix of seven or eight books he has going at once.

It isn’t all serious literature in the cube, however. He keeps Johnnie Walker scotch and Grey Goose vodka in the room’s small wet bar for visitors, as well as cigars. On nice nights, they can step outside to the adjoining deck.

Even among the home’s other oddities, like a bathroom with a mirror that is, by design, shattered, the cube is a highlight when he shows visitors around, Mr. Thompson says.

“There’s a dozen different kinds of sky we get around here,” he says of the changing clouds and multicolored sunsets and sunrises. “It’s really beautiful. It’s kind of like living in an art museum.”